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Games for a netbook?

I'm looking to work abroad and travel next year for an extended spell, and having learnt from past experience that travelling with a 17" laptop is nothing short of torture, I'm going to take my little netbook that I bought for my mum a few years ago to try and teach her some computer basics instead. With that in mind, what games would you recommend for a little machine like that? I'm a big fan of strategy and RPG games, but I'm open to any suggestions. The OS is windows (XP I think) and I've run steam on it before, so steam suggestions are welcome.

I realise it's hard to suggest games for a low-end system when I don't have the specs, but I don't have the laptop with me right now, so I'll pick it up today or tomorrow and post the specs on here when I have them.

I had a computer failure a while back, and was left with a truly ancient laptop that someone had abandoned round my house years ago. The only thing it would run that I found was the original Master of Orion (tried MOO2 but no go).

Highly recommend it if you like 4X games. Will run on anything and is still an awesome game. Better than MOO2 in my personal opinion. It is available on gog in a pack with MOO2 for $5.99 USD.

Nethack will run on anything, and is a joy to play. It's one of the classic rougelikes so you get an RPG with perma death, semi random dungeons, a huge variety of enemies and classes and items and everything. It's hard though, there were 6 years between the first time I gave it a spin and the first time I completed it!

I spent a year studying abroad with just a netbook, and let me tell you, it was a surprisingly versatile little gaming machine. Since they're a fairly recent innovation, i imagine it will have reasonable enough specs to play old games. Your first port of call should be GOG - The classic CRPGS run like a charm on a netbook, once they've been modded up a bit (you'll probably need a patch to change the resolution for an optimum experience, since most netbooks have a 16:9/16:10 screen ratio). I had a whale of a time playing Fallout 1 & 2, Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magic Obscura, Betrayal at Krondor, Planescape Torment, Icewind Dale 1 & 2 and the Temple of Elemental Evil. I'd also recommend the spiderweb RPGs, as they'll run on more or less anything: I personally enjoyed the Geneforge games and Avadon quite a bit. In terms of strategy games, you can't go wrong with the original X-COM - which isn't too hard to get running on modern systems, if you use the UFOLauncher. Jagged Alliance 2 is also a safe bet. From a brief glance at my netbook HDD, i can tell you that Alpha Centauri and Masters of Orion 2 have also given my hours of pleasure.

Straying from RPGs for a bit, adventure games tend to suit netbooks very well - especially since the older ones have a very limited resolution. I won't recommend Grim Fandango, since it's an absolute bitch to get running on modern systems. I got a lot of enjoyment from The Longest Journey, playing on a netbook, and also Gemini Rue, to mention just two.

You'd be surprised how well a netbook can handle older 3D games - so my advice is to experiment and see what it's capable of. I've been able to get games like Warcraft 3 and Freedom Force running extremely smoothly. Hope this helps.

Torchlight has a fairly good netbook mode. It's hard to recommend games without a general set of specs for the machine though. I figure it's going to be something like an Atom 1.6-2.0ghz with Intel GMA 3000 graphics or similar and 1gb of RAM, but it'd be nice to know.

You could also play stuff like Minecraft, Terraria, a lot of indie games. And there's the MtG Duels of the Planeswalkers games, which can be quite fun. Oh, and FreeCiv, which is an open-source(and free!) Civilization II clone. Oh, and practically any game made prior to 2002. Or maybe 2004, it depends on the game, really.

Travelling with a 17" laptop doesn't sound fun (do you know anyone with a 17" lap?), I bought my netbook because I felt the need for a portable device and 15" laptops have never seems that portable for me, since then it has been on numerous trips, including last year's jaunt around New Zealand without feeling bulky and unnecessary.

As for games, I've played quite a bit of Terraria and Puzzle Quest on it, Dungeons of Dredmore and Spacechem are also good choices. I've not really ventured into 3d games on it, usually when away from home I have more important things to do than play games (no, really), and at home it's a web browsing when I cba to get out of bed machine.

A load of indie games already mentioned. Terraria is a great little game.

For RTS, I'm pretty sure you can pick up the entire back catalogue of Command and Conquer, it has 17 games in it and I'd imagine most of them would run on a netbook, in particular the older (and imo better) ones.

As someone else said, get to GOG and buy yourself some of the old ARPGS. Perfect for netbooks.

Travelling with a 17" laptop doesn't sound fun (do you know anyone with a 17" lap?), I bought my netbook because I felt the need for a portable device and 15" laptops have never seems that portable for me, since then it has been on numerous trips, including last year's jaunt around New Zealand without feeling bulky and unnecessary.

I bought the 17" when I was at uni because I wanted a screen big enough to still be able to see my notes when I was using word. Then I decided to do an exchange year with it, and 15 flights later I realised just how stupid I was.

Ok, just took a look at the netbook, it's 1.6ghz with 1gb of ram, can't find any sign of a dedicated graphics card but I think I've run freedom force on it before

As a netbook user for years, GoG will be your immediate and most awesome friend. With Windows XP, you can pretty much run anything old on it. ;P Netbooks are awesome for older games and there are so many of them that I haven't played... I could play games on a netbook for a long time (as long as I had an external mouse).